John encounters a mysterious figure aboard the airship, and reveals a deeper mystery as well.
The forth installment of the John Smith World Jumper serial book one.
Excerpt
As the two guards manhandled me onto the deck, it became obvious that we were travelling at a high rate of speed for a lighter than air craft. A quite noticeable apparent wind was blowing from forward. The initial warmth I had perceived upon the door to the storage locker opening now seemed to be an illusion generated by the stirring of warmer air within, and Layla’s lack of cold weather clothing.
If my rescuer-turned-captor felt any degree of discomfiture from the wind or temperature she gave no sign, striding purposefully along the deck towards a larger hatch leading presumably toward the person I was to ‘meet.’ As I was brought along behind her I was able to glance around briefly at the ship and surroundings.
In actual operation the vessel did seem to be crewed largely as are sailing vessels. Occasionally I noticed men in the same cold weather suits I had seen earlier climbing ropes or ladders. They adjusted various line tensions, tied or untied knots, and moved ballast bags from one location to another.
This was all done quite efficiently and without obvious direction or any kind of supervision. Despite the overall primitiveness of the airship, the propeller mechanism looked to be reasonably complex. Geared drive shafts spun inside of protective housings, only visible when passing through an exposed bearing, or when I saw a crewman open an access panel briefly and refill a reservoir containing a liquid I can only surmise must have been a lubricant of some sort.
The shafts and gears seemed to be the only major exception to the overall wooden construction of the vessel, being made from a grayish metallic alloy of which I could not identify upon mere glimpses. Other smaller fittings, pulleys and pins were made of predominately bronze or copper alloys, as were the guns I had seen.
Of the landscape surrounding the ship, I paid little attention. The airship was, as I indicated previously, high in the air. It was of sufficient altitude that details of the surface were obscured both by distance, and by cloud cover. What I did see of the surface merely told me that the ship was over land and not water.
My sojourn on deck was however quite brief and soon my escorts and I were negotiating a steep ladder, as stairs are called in nautical terminology, down and into the skin of the ship. While the chill air outside had been somewhat invigorating, I was nonetheless glad to be out of the wind. My uplifted mood, slight though it was, soon turned to apprehension as I considered the probable outcome of my rapidly approaching ‘meeting.’
Several possibilities flitted through my thoughts, but as none of them were remotely pleasant, or as it turned out, accurate, I will not elaborate on them. Suffice it to say that when I was roughly pushed through a doorway after Layla, and then thrown to the deck, what met my senses was completely unexpected.
Utterly Fantastic Occurrences is a collection of 20 science fiction short story novellas existing in hardcover, in paperback and in Kindle and Nook e-book formats.
